Help needed for website design

Life Technology
1

Hello:

I have been working with the Taiwan Defense Alliance over the past few months to move forward with establishing a new direction for Taiwan’s future development. We are now planning to rent a Taipei office in August, 2005.

I am planning to put up a simple English language website regarding our agenda for “Taiwan’s future,” and the legal basis for our viewpoints. What I need is an attractive border, a few simple graphics, and to hook up the links. I have the text already typed out in a .doc file, and I have the “connections” for the desired links in a separate .txt file … so what is needed now is some help in putting it all together. My html design skills are quite limited …

I am wondering if anyone would be willing to build such a simple site during a hour or two of their spare time??

I should state at the outset that my goal is to put all of this in one simple html page, with perhaps one or two (at most) subsidiary pages. Then I will email the finished html pages to the fellow that maintains the TDA website. I do not maintain that website, nor do I have the FTP codes for uploading to that website. … Nor can I arrange to upload some shell programs or other programs to that website to power these English language pages.

Hence, my needs are quite simple, but since this is somewhat important I would hope to have a main page which is reasonably attractive, and such html work is beyond my current capabilities. One of my close associates has Dreamweaver, but for some reason we have not been able to use that to come up with anything more than just “straight html coding.”

As an alternative, I would be interested in knowing if there are some ready to go templates or other such things on the internet where perhaps I could just FILL IN THE BLANKS, make choices regarding simple graphics, borders, dividing lines, etc. set up the links, etc. and put something together fairly quickly in that manner.

I have been in contact with the Technical guru of the forumosa.com websites and he has suggested posting my needs directly in this forum.

I am open to constructive advice, suggestions, and outright assistance.

Thank you.

2

There’s a few important follow up questions:

  1. Who is going to host this?
  2. Who owns the domain for the Taiwan Defense Alliance? Is there one? For example www.tda.org.tw or …
  3. Are you looking for a volunteer to do this or will you pay someone to help you do it?
3

I am unaware of who, where, when, what server this website is on. As I understand from our frequent meetings in Taichung, when the internet group gives their report, they do have a firewall. They are in charge of all the technical details. Some of them have degrees in computer engineering or something similar, but they do the TDA stuff in their spare time …

The site is at taiwantda.org.tw/tda/home/

My participation is all volunteer. I would like to find someone to help me put the webpage(s) together in a simple and attractive manner. I have been told that for a person with the necessary expertise, it would not be difficult. I could buy beer.

4

Does the TDA group have colors, logo and those things? Presumably, the web designer would want to do the website based on that.

Building a web page using a template and static content is pretty trivial. A beer may suffice for someone to do it who has a few hours to spend.

5

Yes, your questions are good. I assume one could go to the upper levels of this website and see how they look. Go to taiwantda.org.tw/

I assume that the colors and designs on those upper levels would be good for reference.

6

I found some templates I like’d from here: oswd.org/

I use Nvu ( nvu.com/ ). For doing simple changes and stuff to templates.

You could probably throw something real nice together with your smarts and those 2 links. I’ll have some free time after this weekend (if it came to that).

The Domain name is kind of strange Taiwan Taiwan Defense Alliance (TaiwanTDA).

7

I think that the andreas01 template on that page is quite adequate.

I could provide all the text, as mentioned above … but there would still be some minor design details to attend to I suppose … and I will have to find a suitable picture for the top …

8

[quote=“Hartzell”]I think that the andreas01 template on that page is quite adequate.

I could provide all the text, as mentioned above … but there would still be some minor design details to attend to I suppose … and I will have to find a suitable picture for the top …[/quote]
Formatting a picture to fit into that top bar would be easy enough. Minor details are probably even easier.

9

Right. When I speak of minor details … I was thinking that the SELECTION BARS on the left side would then “jump” to the appropriate areas in the text … and not to separate webpages which would have to load …

But, indeed, for someone with basic html fluency, that is a minor detail I imagine.

10

An option is to create something with your favorite program and use GoLive or Dreamweaver to make the template.

GoLive Co-Author and Macromedia Contribute offer very easy text editing for simple non-database template-based sites. I haven’t yet tried Co-Author with GoLive CS2; Contribute is so easy to use:

csub.edu/BAS/contribute/interface.gif
fxconsult.com.br/xando/macro … itando.gif

You can lock parts of the page giving content editors access to only what you want to them change.